


We Made Our Peace With Lonely Nights

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency! (TV 1972)
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Infant Death, Mainly comfort, Platonic Love, shh they are soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 10:01:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21336409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: One lesson that every paramedic learns is that one day, you're going to get a call and there won't be anything you can do for your patient, not even hope.  That lesson never gets easier to take, but it's easier to handle when you've got a friend - a partner - who gets it.Brice and Bellingham, before, and during, and after.Title taken from Peter Bradley Adams' "Los Angeles":"And you held us in your city lightsWhen our eyes had lost the starsAnd we made our peace with lonely nightsAnd you healed our broken hearts..."Warning: Child Death/Infant Death
Comments: 9
Kudos: 12





	We Made Our Peace With Lonely Nights

You get a call, they say. You get a call sometimes, there's not a damn thing you can do and you know it already.

And sure, is the response. Sure, we know that. We've been to blazes eating up a house to its black ribs, we've drawn back, we've stumbled out the door sweating to the unspoiled lawn gasping, at the twenty-minute limit, at the very limit, not sure if the siding sliding down is the heat or the hallucination.

No, they say. No, you don't, not yet. 

It's Bob's tech, technically speaking, because Craig drove them back (home) just gone midnight and they flopped into (respective) beds not speaking: the report written in Craig's clear precise concise hand with not a mark missed, a routine call, as routine a call as ever, as routine a call as Craig could make it, because that's just what he does. Bob skirts around chaos like finding your way through a fire: he slides between the panic and the pain like you feel a door in the dark: the heat, the smoke, the rope, the staircase. Craig imposes order: Craig cages the monster and tames its shining eyes. 

The other paramedics are maddened: they work so well together. They work together, they drive together, they eat together, they sleep side-by-side together, quick light sleep like a flock of birds changing direction in the sky.

It's Bob's tech and the call says _unknown medical_ and that catches your brain and turns a switch, the key in the ignition, alright, let the bay door rattle, let the lights swing and shine, let's shake a leg and roll, babe, we got no time. Unknown medical might be a sprained ankle on the staircase or it might be a body in the street, it might be the wrong place wrong time, it might be the last place you wanna be, it might be the end of the world or the beginning.

Even Bob's awake. Craig wakes up like he's already got a second track running with a locomotive warm and thrumming, flagman says time to go. (we got no time, though, but to go). Both him and Craig know their district like the backs of their hands or the palms of their gloves or the smell of the sheets they snap on their beds every morning of every shift. Bob likes to spend the drive waking up as if he's swimming up from the bottom of a deep blue pool into the waning sun, like driving down a road watching attractions slip past, opportunities waiting. 

Unknown medical, man down, man up, we got this. 

Craig's very-awake voice is running through the possibilities like the computers at HQ crunch the numbers and send them flying.

Bob is nodding, Bob is making time, Bob is stretching out the time between the call and the place and the night and the day like cotton candy on the tongue.

On the lawn just outside the streetlamp's halo a haggard man stands as if he doesn't deserve the light. He points to the house, where a woman is screaming, a woman screaming and screaming, and the words coalesce between the boards of the board, in the tumblers of the lock, _my baby, my baby, my baby._

But baby, we ain't got no time. 

But the baby is blue and cool and her blood is in the backs of her legs and the backs of her arms and her softness is pale and keenly beautiful and she isn't breathing, she hasn't breathed in hours, in too long, in far too long.

One time, Thibeault, a medic at 8's, got mad at Craig's essential honesty and said, _you don't care about the people, do you,_ and said, _I bet you'd leave a dead kid on scene, wouldn't you?_

Craig had said, simply, he had not yet had such a call. Thibeault found his proof in Craig's flat expression, in his pushing up of his glasses, in his soft and mild voice. In Craig's head a thought rattled: a child, a mother, too much time, and not enough, and never.

What would he do?

Well, babe, now's your chance to show the world: the baby in her duckling pajamas with the fuzzy feet is blue as the moon on the tidal flat, and she is cool as cardiac monitor in his sweating hands, and the baby, she isn't, anymore. And the mother screams and screams: my baby, my baby, save my baby.

It's Bob's tech. It's their call. Send an ambulance, right here, right now, do it fast, do it quick, sweep the mother off her feet and swing low and sweep this baby in your arms, send the night supervisor, we need both medics on this call.

There are words you say that mean: we're bringing you no hope, we're bringing you no life, we're bringing you this body so her mother doesn't have to weep over her until the coroner arrives and by then it will be morning and it will be clear that nothing could be done or will be again.

Doc doesn't say, start an IV. Doc says, keep her on the monitor, Doc says, bring her in.

Fifteen-two, count and breathe and breathe, and count, nevermind the stretcher, never mind the litter bearers only carry her, Bob carries her, compressions with his two fingers, to the ambulance to the rending wail of the mother sending her sorrow to the stars in the smoggy sky, and the father stands smoking a cigarette beyond the light and weeping in an ugly way as men do.

Craig keeps up the compressions while Bob arrays the tools of their trade until a broad hand on his arm and a broad face stays him.

Oh.

But.

" - Bob."

"When we get there," Bob says, softly, his voice sliding the way a boot does on coals.

Rampart's ER is bright as if it hates secrets and fifteen-two is the name of the game, breathe for her, breathe baby, cause baby won't ever breathe again.

Doc calls it, calls the death, calls the time, and it's Early on the overnight, thank god, Early who stays the hand of the pale, pale nursing student who brings the sheet up over the child's face and brings it down to fold it softly down around her neck, to tuck it in sweetly, like she's sleeping. Like she's only sleeping. 

They said, back in training: you're gonna get a call and there isn't a goddamn thing you can do, and you know it.

And a dozen fireman snorted back we know.

And they said: no, you don't. Not yet, you don't.

Rampart's ER is too bright to live with the baby's soft cheeks and slowly sinking eyes. Like the sun inside a box, that's the ER, like daylight trapped eternally, infernally.

Craig checks the box because that is what he does.

Bob falters over the run report because that - 

\- is what he does?

Craig checks the box slowly. Says nothing. The overnight nurse in the ER casts them gentle eyes. Some of the nurses are starting to trust that Brice has a few compassionate neurons firing in his brilliant, brilliant brain, and the cast them gentle eyes. Not the pitying look: not, god, Bellingham's gotta work with _him?_ Not the dry gaze: how long is Brice gonna last with _him?_

Bob takes a long time filling out the demographics. Craig has checked the box twice.

Thibeault and Jackson came in with a drunk with a head lac, took one look at the two of them, and thought twice.

Bob sighs a long, long, long sigh, as long the tide itself.

"Fuck it," he says, the weight of the words striking the silence like a brick, "fuck 'em, HQ can live with a late report."

Craig snaps the box closed. They didn't use anything. He snaps the box closed and fixes the latch and says: "I'll drive, Bob."

They are well late. Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes transport, twenty minutes clear that's very clear, that's in the rules, and the walking rulebook ought to know that but he hesitates to pick up the mic, hesitates on the key, starts driving, that isn't what he does and he knows it and Bob knows it and they know the way home but Craig doesn't take it. 

Not the late-night way, not the wrong-way streets way that Bob would've gone, not the let's-get-back-and-crash way.

The scenic route, as Bob would say. The _inefficient way_, as Craig would note.

Craig would like to say something sympathetic. He would like to say something weighty, something remarkable.

Thibeault said to him once: _you'd leave a dead kid with his mama crying on scene, you son of a bitch._

She looked like she was sleeping.

Jackson would've said she's gone to Jesus.

Gage would've hit something, he is sure of it.

He tries to think of what DeSoto would say. Then, he tries to imagine what Bob would say.

He has drawn the squad up along a roadside above the rail terminal. In the distance, stands of smokestacks wheeze out pale breaths, and blink their aircraft warning lights like animal eyes, red and white and indifferent. A locomotive hoots softly in the yard, and boxcars and tankers clank, clank, clank over poorly welded rails. It smells like Los Angeles always does: like smog and asphalt, like low tide and coal.

He takes a breath as jagged as a drunken fool's lacerated face.

And Bob lays a hand on his arm as soft as a baby's cool cheek.

He shuts his eyes.

Bob touches his hand. He puts his arm - his strange, slender, detached arm - around Bob's wide shoulders, and pulls him close, to feel his head rest, his fraying hair, his stubbled cheek, his gentle hand, his thick bicep that muscles Barrett off the chicken and the chili when Parson cooks. Bob's body, Bob's imperfect warm and breathing body, and he shuts his eyes and the time passes.

"You gonna tell me it's alright?" Bob says, after a while.

"No, Bob."

"Thanks, babe."

"Anytime."

When Craig opens his eyes the world is still there: it hasn't stopped turning, for the undeserving, for the wicked, for the weary, hasn't put its spin on pause for the wailing mother and the bestilled baby, for the father swallowing his sobs on the lawn while the sprinklers chuff, chuff, chuff and hiss.

A streetlight on the boulevard sputters and dies.

They drive back (home) in silence, remind dispatch that they, too, still exist, and fall to bed without words, with Craig's turnouts folded down neatly and Bob's askew, and Bob will snore heavily into the mattress and Craig will end up with one leg outside the covers and one arm asleep under his pillow. Because that is what they do and what they know, because it's not alright, because the world keeps spinning, and all that holds it together isn't the light or the smog or the damp lawn or the hot and reeking asphalt, but just that: just each other, what they do, and what they know.


End file.
